We are happy to announce the new major release
SMW 1.6.0
Semantic MediaWiki
http://semantic-mediawiki.org/
SMW is a popular free and open source content management system based on
the MediaWiki software that powers Wikipedia [1]. It adds capabilities
of semantic data management, querying, and export. Many extensions to
SMW are available for adding further features ranging from faceted data
browsing to RDFa support.
SMW 1.6 newly adds support for using SPARQL-compatible RDF stores for
managing data (including query answering). This is possible by
exploiting the new SPARQL 1.1 Update capabilities for writing, and
SPARQL Query for accessing semantic data. See [2] for details.
Completely rewiring SMW queries to SPARQL requires many different SPARQL
features which is an interesting testbed for RDF stores. The main system
used for development was 4Store which worked quite well. Virtuoso has
been tested successfully too, but the graph support in SMW is currently
a bit limited so adjustments are needed there (will be fixed in upcoming
versions). Feedback on experiences with other RDF stores in combination
with SMW is welcome.
Other changes in SMW 1.6.0 include:
* Added UNIX-style DSV (Delimiter-separated values) result format.
* Added full support for PostgreSQL database backends.
* Reworked internal data model.
* Changed the way in which units of measurement work. Type:Number now
does not accept any units, and a new type "Quantity" is used for numbers
with units.
* The declaration of Type:Record properties has changed. Instead of a
list of datatypes, the declaration now requires a list of properties
that are to be used for the fields of the record.
* Introduced pre-defined builtin properties for every datatype.
* Fixed escaping issues in the JSON result format.
For further details see [3].
It is planned to further extend the SPARQL support for SMW, first by
adding special handling to exploit features of important RDF stores
(e.g. there already is special code for 4Store that exploits its
resource limit features). Moreover, connectivity to other external
SPARQL endpoints might be added (given that SMW already includes a
SPARQL result parser and a SPARQL query builder).
To keep up to date with SMW developments, you can follow the SMW Twitter
[4] or Indenti.ca [5], or register to our mailing lists [6].
Markus
P.S. Apologies if you received multiple copies of this email.
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/
[2] http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Using_SPARQL_and_RDF_stores
[3] http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki_1.6
[4] https://twitter.com/#!/SemanticWiki
[5] https://identi.ca/smw
[6] http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Getting_support
--
Dr. Markus Krötzsch
Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford
Room 306, Parks Road, OX1 3QD Oxford, United Kingdom
+44 (0)1865 283529 http://korrekt.org/
